Days missed, changes in direction, and other things will be documented in comments to this comment. So feel free to comment on this post, but don’t comment on this comment.
5 days have been missed, none happened consecutively. “Don’t skip twice” has been a good star to follow.
For the past month and a half I’ve felt a good deal more mind-wandering than in the first month and a half. This seemed to be related to not giving as much attention to why I am doing this, forgetting the exciting motivation, and treating it as, “routine”. This past week has been a slight uptick in attention. We’ll see what happens.
I’m going to put meditation on pause, but still keep my protected 30 min morning time. I’m going to swap in “Thinking, introspecting, and dwelling on how I relate to other people.”
The decisions comes from a few things:
How I relate to people is one of the most frequent subjects of mind-wandering during meditation.
I’m currently in a relationship that has made me a lot more aware of various habits of behavior and thinking that I have.
I feel well poised to make a lot of progress on that front.
When I mind notice I’m mind wandering, I try to follow, “Why did my attention go from the my breathe to this topic?” I frequently find that I pretty deeply feel that spending time on relations would benefit me more than the meditation (ala this comment).
I’m going to give this a one-month trial period. Expect an update March 31, 2019
I’ve missed seven days of journaling in the last month plus (non consecutive though).
Thoughts: I’ve gotten some good insight from this time. Towards the end, it became more, “What are the important things that happened recently?” journaling.
I’ve put much less ritual-intent into this habit than with meditation. In the past week I changed my sleep schedule (I now sleep in till whenever instead of getting up with an alarm at 7am) which makes it slightly harder to ensure the sanctity of morning journaling, but I’m currently okay with that because sleeping more and getting up at my own pace has had a wonderful positive affect this past week (keeping a keen eye on if that trend continues).
It feels vaguely important to not go into this journaling with an agenda. I get more rewarding journaling when I wait until the thing that catches my interest most works its way to the top of my mind.
When I was doing 6 months of TAPs one of the big things I noticed was that when I disengaged from a TAP (or the TAP was bubbling up to the top layer of conscious awareness, but was dismissed before getting to the top, but still while there was some awareness on it) there was a feeling of, “Oh, I’m not actually convinced of the purpose and mission of this TAP right now”. Once or twice I gained insight from exploring that lack of conviction, and found a hole in the logic of my TAP.
I notice a similar experience in meditation. On the mornings when I feel the most disengaged, and returning to the breath is the most “chore like”, I notice that there’s some way in which I’m no longer convinced that returning to the breath is “the best use of my time”.
Have kept a continuous streak. On a handful of days, something happened in the morning and I mediated in the evening, which was a good bit harder.
I started to use Seinfeld calendar streak idea (replacing “X”s with green arrows) and it’s been surprisingly pleasant. I get way more joy than anticipated from being able to put a green arrow on the wall every day, and to see a long chain of green arrows on said wall. One day over thanksgiving, morning meditation didn’t work out, and I was going to drop it that day (it felt okay on a principled level, since thanksgiving was when I was originally intending to re-calibrate my intentions) but as soon as I imagined my calendar not having those green arrows I felt a huge emotional shift. Also interesting, it didn’t feel like a guilt trip, it felt more like, “I can’t allow this to happen because then I don’t get my amazingly beautiful green arrows and there will be an ugly whole on the calendar, and that’s just not how the world is going to be if I have anything to say about it”.
Only update on meditation “progress” is that I feel little to no resistance to spending time meditating. There’s no ugg field around “having” to do it when I wake up, when I sit down I’m mostly excited, and when it’s getting to the end of the 30 minutes I’m rarely restless/”just waiting for it to be over”. Mind wandering vs breath focus time doesn’t seem to have changed much.
I still haven’t read all the way through the mind illuminated. That might happen over winter break, but it’s not a super high priority.
I think my new intention is continue meditating daily into the foreseeable future. The shape of my time is regular enough that I don’t expect this to be a huge challenge, and since I’ve gotten more comfortable with spending time meditating I’d be very surprised at some internal jumping-ship.
If things ever get more chaotic, on Malcolm Ocean’s recommendation I think I’m going to try the don’t skip twice approach (raemon also mentions it in sunset at noon which is still a great post a year later)
Was thinking about Getting Got in terms of goals, and realized that my target was implicitly, “Meditate every day forever”, which makes anything less (even if it’s a Good Idea) Giving Up (which feels Bad). So my new intention is that until Thanksgiving, daily meditation is a “The world must explode before I give up” target, at which point I’ll reconsider what my intention is.
Days missed, changes in direction, and other things will be documented in comments to this comment. So feel free to comment on this post, but don’t comment on this comment.
It’s been 112 days on this habit.
5 days have been missed, none happened consecutively. “Don’t skip twice” has been a good star to follow.
For the past month and a half I’ve felt a good deal more mind-wandering than in the first month and a half. This seemed to be related to not giving as much attention to why I am doing this, forgetting the exciting motivation, and treating it as, “routine”. This past week has been a slight uptick in attention. We’ll see what happens.
I’m going to put meditation on pause, but still keep my protected 30 min morning time. I’m going to swap in “Thinking, introspecting, and dwelling on how I relate to other people.”
The decisions comes from a few things:
How I relate to people is one of the most frequent subjects of mind-wandering during meditation.
I’m currently in a relationship that has made me a lot more aware of various habits of behavior and thinking that I have.
I feel well poised to make a lot of progress on that front.
When I mind notice I’m mind wandering, I try to follow, “Why did my attention go from the my breathe to this topic?” I frequently find that I pretty deeply feel that spending time on relations would benefit me more than the meditation (ala this comment).
I’m going to give this a one-month trial period. Expect an update March 31, 2019
I’ve missed seven days of journaling in the last month plus (non consecutive though).
Thoughts: I’ve gotten some good insight from this time. Towards the end, it became more, “What are the important things that happened recently?” journaling.
I’ve put much less ritual-intent into this habit than with meditation. In the past week I changed my sleep schedule (I now sleep in till whenever instead of getting up with an alarm at 7am) which makes it slightly harder to ensure the sanctity of morning journaling, but I’m currently okay with that because sleeping more and getting up at my own pace has had a wonderful positive affect this past week (keeping a keen eye on if that trend continues).
It feels vaguely important to not go into this journaling with an agenda. I get more rewarding journaling when I wait until the thing that catches my interest most works its way to the top of my mind.
That’s another type of meditation. Throw in some “notice how this goes” and “monkey mind meditation” and you’re still meditating
When I was doing 6 months of TAPs one of the big things I noticed was that when I disengaged from a TAP (or the TAP was bubbling up to the top layer of conscious awareness, but was dismissed before getting to the top, but still while there was some awareness on it) there was a feeling of, “Oh, I’m not actually convinced of the purpose and mission of this TAP right now”. Once or twice I gained insight from exploring that lack of conviction, and found a hole in the logic of my TAP.
I notice a similar experience in meditation. On the mornings when I feel the most disengaged, and returning to the breath is the most “chore like”, I notice that there’s some way in which I’m no longer convinced that returning to the breath is “the best use of my time”.
12-13-18 Update:
Have kept a continuous streak. On a handful of days, something happened in the morning and I mediated in the evening, which was a good bit harder.
I started to use Seinfeld calendar streak idea (replacing “X”s with green arrows) and it’s been surprisingly pleasant. I get way more joy than anticipated from being able to put a green arrow on the wall every day, and to see a long chain of green arrows on said wall. One day over thanksgiving, morning meditation didn’t work out, and I was going to drop it that day (it felt okay on a principled level, since thanksgiving was when I was originally intending to re-calibrate my intentions) but as soon as I imagined my calendar not having those green arrows I felt a huge emotional shift. Also interesting, it didn’t feel like a guilt trip, it felt more like, “I can’t allow this to happen because then I don’t get my amazingly beautiful green arrows and there will be an ugly whole on the calendar, and that’s just not how the world is going to be if I have anything to say about it”.
Only update on meditation “progress” is that I feel little to no resistance to spending time meditating. There’s no ugg field around “having” to do it when I wake up, when I sit down I’m mostly excited, and when it’s getting to the end of the 30 minutes I’m rarely restless/”just waiting for it to be over”. Mind wandering vs breath focus time doesn’t seem to have changed much.
I still haven’t read all the way through the mind illuminated. That might happen over winter break, but it’s not a super high priority.
I think my new intention is continue meditating daily into the foreseeable future. The shape of my time is regular enough that I don’t expect this to be a huge challenge, and since I’ve gotten more comfortable with spending time meditating I’d be very surprised at some internal jumping-ship.
If things ever get more chaotic, on Malcolm Ocean’s recommendation I think I’m going to try the don’t skip twice approach (raemon also mentions it in sunset at noon which is still a great post a year later)
Was thinking about Getting Got in terms of goals, and realized that my target was implicitly, “Meditate every day forever”, which makes anything less (even if it’s a Good Idea) Giving Up (which feels Bad). So my new intention is that until Thanksgiving, daily meditation is a “The world must explode before I give up” target, at which point I’ll reconsider what my intention is.